I’d like to say a big thank you to the creators and developers of Julia. The year 2016, if disappointing in some ways (!), has though been a good year for us Julia users!
What I like about Julia is that it’s easy to use, powerful, fast, and free. I haven’t found many programming languages that score highly in all four areas. The good thing about it being easy to use is that you don’t have to be a fully-fledged computer scientist to get some results immediately.
And that’s also why it’s great that Julia is also powerful and fast - you get reasonable performance out of the box, and often you don’t need to spend hours fine-tuning your code to make it run fast (and there’s plenty of scope for more advanced users to turbocharge their code). Because it’s designed for technical computing, it can easily handle my more day-to-day scripting and computing tasks. I also appreciate that it’s free…!
So thank you Julia creators and developers, and everyone who puts their effort into this great project. 2017 looks to be another good year for Julia.
I coded a small seasonal animation to while away a few winter hours over Christmas - you can find it here (with apologies for the hemispherism of suggesting that it’s snowing outside, which even here in my corner of the Northern Hemisphere it usually isn’t).
It was much more interesting to write than it will be to watch, but at least it records the top 100 or so Julia contributors in 2016, and the music is cool.